I think you're making a genre assumption about The Passion that's difficult to support. It's a work of devotion, more Thomas a Kempis than Spielberg. That might not be a move that's permitted or viable in films - which is something I'd have to take your word on. Or it might just be a poorly executed of devotion, but I think he'd probably admit to assuming that viewers already knew and cared about Christ and the Passion narrative and that was part of the point.

I don't really have a good movie analogy for the sort of point I'm trying to make here. Perhaps I'll come up with one eventually.

>There are several who get better performances out of
>their actors.

I'm also not sure whether to take this as a criticism or simply at face value, the latter meaning that he's simply out of "the top five" (which probably isn't a useful construction anyhow). I thought the performances he got out of both Monica Bellucci and Maia Morgenstern in TPOTC were pretty phenomenal, and in an ancient language as well. Apocalypto was full of relative newcomers who turned in fine performances. I'm not well-versed enough in how this all works, but it seems unlikely that he just lucked into an entire cast of hidden gems for Apocalypto.

Uh... that's pretty much it for what I have to add. I've often considered that I'm not a great judge of acting, so I'm willing (to a degree) to be corrected on some of these points. The objective behind this post (the troublesome "top five" thing) seems less interesting here than the possibility that Gibson's ambition would be a lot more highly thought of here (and elsewhere) if people didn't find him so personally problematic. I don't have any particular problem with that - voting with your feet is a time-honored tradition, but it seems to occasionally result in a rather abrupt discussion of some interesting films.